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TOPIC: Short exposures for ZWO cameras

Here is an image from just before dawn this morning edited in PixInsight. Cropped and gamma changed slightly with curves. Exposure 30s, gain 240, gamma was 1 but this was too low. Camera temperature nearly down to freezing. Saved in JPG format - for some reason it wouldn't save in PNG. Wasn't space as there was 87GB free space on the drive.

Raspbian has the big advantage that you can make the software on the microSD card work headless from the off. So far I haven't seen any suggestion of making the system headless in Ubuntu Mate without having human interfaces on the RPi to set things up first. I know this only has to be done once and then you have a template image to write to other cards which can then be edited for variations. I have done this with Raspbian to clone cards for my various imaging systems. But if the only way I can get short exposures is with Ubuntu Mate I'll have to use it.

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I've been reading up on developing INDI drivers and I think I'm about ready to write my own or modify existing drivers to suit my purposes. I have also been working on the hardware for my All Sky Camera and sorting out what I want to control. As a result I have just connected my RPi (with Ubuntu Mate installed) to monitor, keyboard, trackball, router (cable) and power, and it's working now! It did flash up the load kernel modules error but carried on regardless. I was able to log in as ubuntu and using my set PW. I wonder why it didn't work before - a mystery! Now to look at installing the INDI library and drivers etc. I'll report how it goes.

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Well... Installed Ubuntu Mate onto another card, edited config.txt as suggested in AstroPi3, put card in RPi and powered up. It started, rebooted then showed the setup window. I entered my Wi-Fi SSID and PW and clicked Connect at which point the screen went blank and said "No Signal" green and red lights on the RPi stayed on. I left it over half an hour and decided it had crashed. Tried all the usual things including powering down and up again but it just resumed with both lights on. I'm now re-flashing the card in Etcher and will try again without setting up Wi-Fi. I shall want Wi-Fi but I assume this can be set up later.

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The setup window gave different results this time. Started with language, keyboard, and location, the computer name and password all in the GUI. Then showed a progress bar - "Installing System" then the screen went blank again. Both lights on - maybe it is installing the system - I'll leave it a while. Like overnight!!

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The first time you turn it on it should reboot right away to resize the partition. Then yes, the setup for the language, keyboard, location, etc should definitely happen. Then yes it should install the stuff and then restart automatically. But no, it should not have gone black before the setup screens came up. Is your SD card good? Is the power to the pi good? Hopefully when you start it up again it will be fine!

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Yes, it rebooted straight away to resize the partition. Thanks for suggesting power issues - that was it - it's working now. I was running off a 5v plug type PSU. I'm now running it from 5.1v from bench PSU. I was able to set up Wi-Fi too and it was working for a while but now isn't. Should be plenty of signal as it's only 4m away from the router. I'll connect by cable for now and sort out the Wi-Fi later.

Firefox crashes when started So I can't use that to read the web and copy/paste commands into the Terminal. And I don't have SSH working yet so I'll have to write down the commands and type them in. No great problem really.

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I appear to have the new setup working. The script (after editing) ran fine and I have SSH available from my Linux Mint desktop over the wlan. I think the problem with Firefox was that I updated/upgraded when I shouldn't have done. The relevant upgrades are covered in the script and the usual "upgrade everything" is not wanted. So I'm starting again, flashing another card with Ubuntu Mate and following the AstroRPi3 instructions. I want everything correct so I'm following instructions to the letter

Later... Yes, Firefox working fine now and now running (edited) script for which I thank you - very useful.

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Using Ubuntu Mate as OS rather than Raspbian has cured the short exposure problem for the ZWO ASI185MC camera. I can now set the exposure down to 3.2e-5 ie. 0.000032s. Thank you everyone for all your help

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